Can Navy Afford 'Death Ray' It Wants?

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Can Navy Afford 'Death Ray' It Wants?

The Navy keeps pouring money into high-tech ships, next-gen communications gear – even a "death ray" pre-prototype. But if the sea service can't get costs for the new gear under control, it's putting itself at risk.

That was the message from Robert Work, the undersecretary of the Navy, to the opening of the Office of Naval Research's annual science and technology conference in Arlington, Virginia, where the Navy and its contractors are showing off some of their most far-out designs. Work, a longtime defense wonk, is a big fan of all of those efforts, calling the research shop the "incubator for discovery, research and innovation" that's kept the Navy and Marine Corps more tech-savvy than its rivals. But, he added, "the secretary and I consider cost a threat."

Work meant two things by that. First, in a literal sense, the cost of maintaining the Navy's 280 ships is growing at a rate faster than inflation. That's not an auspicious sign for growing the fleet to its planned 313 ships, even as it takes unexpected cost-constraining measures like buying competing designs of its close-in fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship. "If the [scientific and technological] community cannot help us address total ownership cost," Work said, "we will quickly find ourselves with a fleet too small" for the Navy's worldwide missions.

But the threat is also about the way the Navy's potential adversaries are finding cheap ways to blunt its dominance. The proliferation of precision-guided munitions is a huge challenge for the Navy – one of the reasons that the Navy spends so much time talking about "anti-access/area denial" challenges, in which cheap, accurate rockets and missiles keep warships at bay.

In a case that the U.S. military has studied at length, Hezbollah knocked an Israeli corvette out of service during the 2006 war using a radar-guided rocket, one of a few in the guerrilla group's arsenal of unguided rockets and mortars. Work praised a joint U.S.-Israeli venture called David's Sling, designed for "shooting down rockets, artillery and guided mortars," adding, "That's what we need to think about."

But that also leads to some far-out technical efforts – few of which come cheap. Like lasers, for instance. It would be too expensive to use a guided munition to hit another guided munition, Work said, so the Navy is making "breakthroughs on directed energy." Such as the Free Electron Laser, a multi-wavelength laser that the Navy wants to put aboard its ships to fry incoming rockets or missiles with 100 kilowatts of energy.

It's also developing an Electromagnetic Rail Gun that uses electromagnetic pulses to fire a big bullet into space at speeds of Mach 7 and then hurtling onto an enemy target at speeds of Mach 5.

Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, the chief of naval research, said that prototypes of the rail gun generate 25 megajoules of energy, and a test next month will attempt 32 megajoules, getting a projectile traveling 100 nautical miles in six minutes – "well ahead of pace" for a target of 64 megajoules for a range of 200 miles in six minutes.

Both weapons have a lot of buzz at this conference – more on that in a subsequent post. "We all, of course, want the multi-megawatt death ray," Carr said, confessing that he certainly does. But laser and electromagnetic research can have other applications, like tracking incoming targets, not just shooting them down. After all, he said, the Navy needs "multimission" weapons if it's going to have a prayer of keeping costs down.